Cara Jones is a filmmaker, writer, founder of Storytellers for Good and director of the upcoming documentary Second Coming. Also a Moth Story SLAM winner and writing published in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and Huffington Post. Cara was raised in the Unification Church, better known as the Moonies, and was married in a mass wedding while a sophomore at Princeton. Her upcoming film "Second Coming" explored her departure from the church and this decision's impact of her and her family.

For her most recent book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton & Co., coming Sept. 2017), she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in our precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of drivingfrom coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.

Jessica has been teaching at Columbia Journalism School since 2008. She has written for publications including Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, O: The Oprah Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Reuters and CNNMoney.com, along with The Oregonian and The New York Observer where she worked as a staff writer and Fortune Small Business magazine, where she was a senior editor. Her long-form stories have won a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and a Deadline Club Award.